In this year of pervasive teacher-bashing and general assaults on public education, two things have generally been hailed by "reform" advocates as the cure for all schooling ills: charter schools and basing just about everything on "performance," a term defined (of course) solely by high-stakes testing.
In southern California this week, where statewide test results for the 2010-2011 school year were released, charter schools and high-stakes testing came together to create a story which underscored exactly how neither of these "reform" planks are necessarily a silver bullet for education:
By most measures, Green Dot Public Schools, a well-regarded group of a dozen public charter schools in Greater Los Angeles, had a great year on test scores.
But that success has been tempered by a black spot: One of its high schools, Animo Leadership - which has an Inglewood address but is chartered by the Lennox School District - was disqualified from receiving an official Academic Performance Index score due to concerns over cheating.
The state on Wednesday released API scores for most every school in the state, but for Animo Leadership, in place of a score, the state database listed a cryptic message regarding a testing "irregularity."
Green Dot leaders on Wednesday explained that they discovered a high number of erasure marks on several 11th-grade physics exams, and promptly reported the matter to officials with the California Department of Education.
To Animo/Green Dot's considerable credit, they called the foul on themselves, a fact noted by the firm's CEO, who unwittingly painted a compelling contrast to one of the darlings of the "educational reform" industry:
"We went after it pretty hard and aggressively," Mario Petruzzi, CEO of Green Dot schools, told the Daily Breeze. "We did not try to sweep it under the rug. Will people every now and then try to cheat? Of course. But how you react to it sends a strong signal about how the organization feels about it."
This, of course, paints a pretty compelling contrast to Michelle Rhee, who seemed determined to ignore, and subsequently minimize, a burgeoning cheating scandal under her own purview.
Green Dot was not the only charter school firm to be tainted by test-related scandals. Another LA-area charter organization, Crescendo Schools, will watch six of their schools shuttered by LAUSD after it was revealed that the school founder ordered staffers to open the sealed statewide tests, and use actual test questions in the "test preparation" process.
The lesson here is not to malign charter schools, many of whom do fine work and color within the lines, so to speak. The point is twofold: Charter schools are not infallible (contrary to what is often flogged in the public conversation), and defining the worth of schools by a single exam sitting is not only a piss-poor method of determining a school's value, it also leads to some outcomes that are less than savory.
The latter point, of course, is one that has been pushed by teachers unions constantly as of late. With GOP-led state legislatures willing to base salaries and future employment on these kinds of high-stakes test scores, these two incidents underscore the real flaws in such "reform" measures. Unions have long argued that these are imperfect metrics. This is just another item in the evidence locker to suggest that they are right.